John Logie's blog . . . core topics include rhetoric, internet studies, intellectual property, culture, politics.

Friday, April 18, 2003

What Th--? The Clark Kent DMCA was bad enough!

Enboldened by their success in getting the DMCA passed, and by recent successes in using it as an enforcement tool, the content industries are now stealthily approaching state legislatures and asking for, and getting all of the "leftovers" from their DMCA "wish lists" passed as state laws. The sobriquet for this new aggregation of legal sticky wickets? "Super DMCA." So even if smart humans like Zoe Lofgren are successful in getting Congress to repeal the most burdensome elements of the DMCA, that accomplishment may well be mooted by the cumulative effect of state laws reinforcing those same provisions (and worse). If only we could get our hands on some DMCA kryptonite. (And that sentence is grounded in the hope that neither Warner Brothers nor the bike lock people are now empowered to sue me under Texas law.)